When law firms switch to Clio or LeanLaw, they often leave their bookkeeper out of the planning. That's a mistake. Timeslips, trust balances, and client billing structures get lost or mismatched in the move, and Clio requires manual setup that LeanLaw handles automatically. Bookkeepers need a seat at the table from the start.
Chapters
This week we're going to talk about the pitfalls and the perks of law firm software and doing a migration from one software to Clio. So really talking about the Clio side of a data migration. This has been kind of a hot topic in our firm because a lot of times a client doesn't even tell us they're changing software. I think they don't think we need to know. Until it's either happened or it's happening in a week or something like that. And we've never been part of the process of the data migration. So we need to really have conversations with our clients to let them know that you should let us know when you're considering software. You should talk to us about what software to choose and when. And most of the people that come to us know we are big promoters of Clio or LeanLaw. Those are our two big ones. Mm-hmm. So they know we know our stuff about that. So we tend not to get clients in PracticePanther or Cosmolex. It's not usually what we see because people come to us knowing we're the legal accounting experts in these two software. But if you have that client, and this happened to us a couple of times last year, as a client that just says, oh, I'm considering it, it's a time to open the door and say, hey, I want to take the lead on this. I want to be kept in the loop with any conversations you have with the people at Clio. About the data migration or even the people at LeanLaw. You want to have that conversational moment with the client and with the tech, the, the people that are doing the data migration. Why do you want this? We know how this is stated and what it looks like on the other side. We know how it's going to be coming across. I think a lot of times it's not told to the clients in the data migration conversation from the tech software company. Or from that sales team what it looks like. I think a lot of people think that when it comes across in Clio, they're gonna flip the switch, all the work in process is gonna be there, which it is, but it might not look the way you want it presented and it might not be validated. You have to validate those numbers. So if it says XYZ in timeslips, it should say XYZ inside of Clio. Now when you get the client list in, they'll import a client list, but If the client list is brought over and it was flat, as Sarah likes to call it, flat, it was one way. And in LeanLaw you have multiple, you can bill at the client level, bill, bill at the matter level. So if you have that kind of a combination in your firm, if you're using timeslips even, that's when you need to make sure that when you're showing it and presenting it in Clio, Clio has the client is just the customer. The matter is where all the action happens. So you have to make sure that data is presented properly inside the file during the migration. When you work in Clio, no opening balances come over. So if you have existing opening balances in trust, they do not show inside of Clio. You have to put them there. That's when you want a good bookkeeping company to make sure that that happens. Same for LeanLaw, except LeanLaw works differently. It connects at a deeper level. So those balances show, it's gonna pull in what's there. There's parts of it that might not work on the older existing stuff that when they start to process through LeanLaw, it's much more friendly. Same with Clio. With Clio, you want to make sure that your accounts receivable balances align. So old accounts receivable that was outstanding in the system may not show properly inside of Clio after data migration. You need to know these things. You need to make sure that you validate. You need to make sure that this is a smooth transfer of data from point A to point B. Naming, the naming inside of QuickBooks, if you're not using software and then you move to Clio, you have to make sure that the naming is done properly. The numbering is done properly. It might have different language, like it might be called a matter in there, but you might be used to using the word case. So these are all things that you really need to familiarize yourself with. And I've also noticed sometimes the ball is dropped with Clio migration in particular, but probably sometimes with LeanLaw. They don't really finesse the, they don't really go deep. The sales team doesn't go deep or the migration team doesn't go deep enough to help you with settings to make sure that you're, using all of the parts of the product that are available? Are you tracking by practice area? You need to set that up. It's very simple to set up in QuickBooks and LeanLaw because you can connect to what's existing. In Clio, you have to do it a different way. If you wanna do practice area and push that data into QuickBooks, you have to make sure that you create those naming of new item, new classes. Even if you had existing, you have to shut the existing off and the new ones have to be done through Clio. You can't just connect to the old ones like you can in LeanLaw. So there's a lot of different ways and different parts of this, but I wanted you to at least know that there's, these things are out there. If you are considering moving a client from some software to Clio or LeanLaw and you're interested in learning more about that so you can step in front of it and be there for your client, reach out to us. We can help you. We can help you with the migration and we can also help you with working with the client. We have the Accountants Law Lab and that's what it's for. We're helping other bookkeepers and accountants Learn these things that you need to know. And this is a big one because a data migration that goes wrong can really be very, very difficult for a client. Hope that's helpful and we'll see you all next week. Bye now. Bye.
